The Dreamweaver's Market
Morning arrives in Nirengai the way it always does—not with a sunrise, but with a *sigh*.
Yume feels it before she sees it: a soft exhale of gold that seeps through the cracks in her shutters, pooling across the ceiling in slow, syrupy ripples. She lies still for a moment, watching the light climb the walls of her tiny room, tracing over the dozens of sketches pinned there like constellations only she can read. Paired figures. Intertwined silhouettes. Yosou spirits drawn mid-orbit around each other, their forms rendered in charcoal and colored chalk, joined by threads of her own invention—swooping lines of red and gold that she imagines as something like fate, or maybe just really good taste.
She grins at the ceiling. Some things never get old.
Below her window, the city is waking too. Nirengai does not so much begin the day as *unfurl* into it, the way a flower opens without ever quite deciding to. The cobblestones outside shimmer faintly, caught in that half-second between real stone and drifting mist, the boundary between waking and dreaming still soft at this hour. It won't fully solidify until midday, when the dream-fog burns off and the streets become ordinary…
